Blindsight

“They don’t like company,” I reminded him. You didn’t put vampires of the same sex together, not unless you were taking bets on a bloodbath. They were solitary hunters and very territorial. With a minimum viable pred-prey ratio of one to ten — and human prey spread so sparsely across the Pleistocene landscape — the biggest threat to their survival had been competition from their own kind. Natural selection had never taught them to play nicely together.

That didn’t cut any ice with Szpindel, though. “Doesn’t mean he can’t be lonely,” he insisted.

“Just means he can’t fix it.”

“They know the music but not the words.”

—Hare, Without Conscience

We did it with mirrors, great round parabolic things, each impossibly thin and three times as high as a man. Theseus rolled them up and bolted them to firecrackers stuffed with precious antimatter from our dwindling stockpiles. With twelve hours to spare she flung them like confetti along precise ballistic trajectories, and when they were safely distant she set them alight. They pinwheeled off every which way, gamma sleeting in their wake until they burned dry. Then they coasted, unfurling mercurial insect wings across the void.

In the greater distance, four hundred thousand alien machines looped and burned and took no obvious notice.

Rorschach fell around Ben barely fifteen hundred kilometers from atmosphere, a fast endless circle that took just under forty hours to complete. By the time it didn’t return to our sight, the mirrors were all outside the zone of total blindness. A closeup of Ben’s equatorial edge floated in ConSensus. Mirror icons sparkled around it like an exploding schematic, like the disconnected facets of some great expanding compound eye. None had brakes. Whatever high ground the mirrors held, they wouldn’t hold it for long.

“There,” Bates said.

A mirage wavered stage left, a tiny spot of swirling chaos perhaps half the size of a fingernail held at arms-length. It told us nothing, it was pure heat-shimmer — but light bounced towards us from dozens of distant relayers, and while each saw scarcely more than our last probe had — a patch of dark clouds set slightly awry by some invisible prism — each of those views refracted differently. The Captain sieved flashes from the heavens and stitched them into a composite view.

Details emerged.

First a faint sliver of shadow, a tiny dimple all but lost in the seething equatorial cloud bands. It had just barely rotated into view around the edge of the disk — a rock in the stream perhaps, an invisible finger stuck in the clouds, turbulence and shear stress shredding the boundary layers to either side.

Szpindel squinted. “Plage effect.” Subtitles said he was talking about a kind of sunspot, a knot in Ben’s magnetic field.

“Higher,” James said.

Something floated above that dimple in the clouds, the way a ground-effect ocean-liner floats above the depression it pushes into the water’s surface. I zoomed: next to an Oasa subdwarf with ten times the mass of Jupiter, Rorschach was tiny.

Next to Theseus, it was a colossus.

Not just a torus but a tangle, a city-sized chaos of spun glass, loops and bridges and attenuate spires. The surface texture was pure artifice, of course; ConSensus merely giftwrapped the enigma in refracted background. Still. In some dark, haunting way, it was almost beautiful. A nest of obsidian snakes and smoky crystal spines.

“It’s talking again,” James reported.

“Talk back,” Sarasti said, and abandoned us.

* * *

So she did: and while the Gang spoke with the artefact, the others spied upon it. Their vision failed over time — mirrors fell away along their respective vectors, lines-of-sight degraded with each passing second — but ConSensus filled with things learned in the meantime. Rorschach massed 1.8^.10¹⁰ kg within a total volume of 2.3^.10⁸ cubic meters. Its magnetic field, judging by radio squeals and its Plage Effect, was thousands of times stronger than the sun’s. Astonishingly, parts of the composite image were clear enough to discern fine spiral grooves twined around the structure. ("Fibonacci sequence,” Szpindel reported, one jiggling eye fixing me for a moment. “At least they’re not completely alien.") Spheroid protuberances disfigured the tips of at least three of Rorschach’s innumerable spines; the grooves were more widely spaced in those areas, like skin grown tight and swollen with infection. Just before one vital mirror sailed out of range it glimpsed another spine, split a third of the way along its length. Torn material floated flaccid and unmoving in vacuum.

“Please,” Bates said softly. “Tell me that’s not what it looks like.”

Szpindel grinned. “Sporangium? Seed pod? Why not?”